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The Liverpool Waterfront - panorama

Some time ago I set out to get a panorama of the Liverpool Waterfront from Birkenhead, armed with Eos 5D, tripod, levelling head etc and decent quality prime lens, EF 135 F2L. In the event, after finding a good vantage point close to the ferry terminal, I noticed that heavy clouds would soon obscure the sun, so I shot hand-held using the EF 70-200 F4L zoom which was fitted to my camera. (It was set to 131mm.) I tried to keep the far water's edge central and shot 23 (raw & jpeg) exposures for the complete panorama from north-west river bank round to south west river bank, i.e. clockwise. As I finished, the sun went behind the cloud and didn't reappear.

The light levels varied enormously, and I'd preset the camera for a correct manual exposure in the brighter areas looking towards the sun. The panorama attached below is from 6 exposures, somewhat under-exposed before levelling, showing the well known river frontage, and I've downisized it to 1000 pixels high. The original panorama is 14,781 pixels wide by around 2,500 pixels high. I used Canon's Photostitch for the original stitching, but this took its alignment from the ripped water and made a mess of the tower cranes, and I had better results from Arcsoft which was used for the uploaded shot here. The source images here were from the jpeg set.

Liverpool Waterfront
(The Anglican Cathedral is further to the right and captured on other shots not included here.)

I have printed it on separate sheets of A4, and Sellotaped together, making a very detailed print around 4 feet wide, but have yet to find a commercial printer who can give me confidence that his printer can do it justice, and print out the fine detail of the original.

Re: The Liverpool Waterfront - panorama

Re: The Liverpool Waterfront - panorama

Thank you for your encouraging comments.

I have tried other panoramas using my Manfrotto 303 panorama head, and OK it works, but the subject matter wasn't in the same class as the Liverpool Waterfront.

So far, I haven't tried using any of the raw images. Firstly, I'm not sure whether stitching software can deal with .tif files, and I fear that I might run out of RAM in my computer, even though I've got 3GB installed.